Originally Posted by
SapInMyBlood
At the end of the day, you need to burn more calories than you're ingesting. If you only restrict your diet, I would argue that you're also limiting the amount of micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. You're better off eating normally and increasing your activity, whilst maintaining the same intake.
Banking on increased activity as a means of losing weight is pretty difficult way to lose weight. It just doesn't work for the majority of people. If there's enough of an issue with discipline that you can't control caloric intake, then there's certainly going to be an issue with exercising when you're tired, busy, etc.
And unless you're eating some really awful fast food or freeze dried stuff from a cardboard box all day, restricting caloric intake by 500 or so calories a day is certainly not going to impact micronutrients in any meaningful way.